In-person at last! B2B Sales & Marketing Exchange - A Trip Report (Pt. 1)

I attended the first two days of the B2B Sales and Marketing Exchange conference. Thanks to Judd Borakove and Sangram Vajre for inviting/sponsoring me. Come, follow my two days of learning and networking. (I was unable to attend day three.)

This trip report is filtered through my (biased) brain, and there are obviously many points I have missed or skipped or editorialized on a bit. Your mileage may vary.

Leveraging Your Existing Marketing Programs To Enable Your Sales Team

Session by Pam Didner. She offered her materials from the session if you reach out to her. Gary's main takeaways:

1. The customer-centric journey differs from the sales stages. It's our responsibility to understand the customer journey and to map marketing content to the customer journey. But it also essential to understand the sales stages your firm uses and also map the customer journey to the sales stages.
2. With #1 well done, you can map existing content to sales stages, and also come up with a plan and schedule to build out additional content that better matches your matrixed map of customer-centric + sales centric frameworks.
3. Marketers talk about understanding customer personas. What about understanding the personas of our own sales teams(s)? Do the work to understand the motivations of your own sales teams in a 500 word (no more, no less) in a simple persona model.
4. With the above work done well, ask yourself where can you help in your current role? And, if you have trouble helping, ask for help from your management.
5. In the constant back and forth of "to gate or not to gate" I heard Pam provide an awesome piece of advice. At the right point in the process, put some gated content out there. Not to get contacts (although that is one point), but rather to test intention.
6. Data cleansing is essential. Customer data changes at a rate of 25% per quarter!
7. Co-marketing via MDF, case studies, podcasts, etc. is essential in any modern marketing mix.
8. No matter how good you are or what your level is, you need help:

"Management has to do half the work. If you need to ask for leadership help, be very specific about the points in the process you need help with"

Pam was a dynamic speaker. Her style was energy, jumping around, being occasionally ribald (appropriately), and bringing in pop-culture metaphors. I had the chance, and she was gracious enough to sit down for a 15 minute 1:1 with me and shared her story of becoming a consultant.

Vendor Visits

It was a small conference, and I had a chance to visit with all the vendors for at least a few minutes.

Bottom line: Everything was centered around Account Based Marketing (ABM). It was like someone has invented a new kind of cake that has no calories. ABM was queen/king 'o the show. From how to better identify specific individuals, to better track content, to better communicate with prospects via AI bots that transition on-the-fly to real people, to data cleansing, to psychology of communication, to consulting to teach marketers - most everything was ABMish. That said, I am wary of the "flavor of the year" -- but at the core there are some traits of the vendors and the talks that have been around a long time, are tried and true, and are being adapted to what technology now allows.

Presentation style:Please read my article Zero Dollar Tradeshow Tips to Increase Your Lead Gen ROI a Bajillion Percent. I was both surprised and pleased at how many people at a senior level conference were not and were using these best practices.

How Kazoo Combines The Power Of Bombora & 6sense To Find More In-Market Accounts

Session by Kate Athmer. My main takeaway was the seafood metaphor I've personally used, but she used it better.

Are you lake fishing or are you spear fishing? How do you separate hand raisers from those with buying intent? There is a surge in demand for information about accounts that are in market. Intent. Another keyword of the conference. Every ABM vendor or marketing stack was talking about identifying intent.

Keynote: How 2020 Strengthened Collective Revenue Generation For High-Performing B2B Brands

Session by Craig Rosenberg. Main takeaways:

1. 80% of top performers say sales and marketing are well aligned.
2. Majority of Chief Sales Officers (CROs too I guess) are spending 20% more time with the CMO than before the pandemic.
3. Create cross functional communication strategies at the annual, quarterly, monthly, and weekly level. (Or die [editorial comment from Gary].)
4. Over half of organizations evolved their Ideal Customer Profiles in 2020.
5. Create data-driven ICPs and be prepared to adjust
6. He presented Gartner's Rubric about testing and identifying new ICPs (Planning, Control, Pace of Change)
7. By end of 2022 over 70% of B2B marketers will utilize 3rd party intent data
8. Support multiple GTM strategies and prepare to scale up/down. Multiple funnels are OK.
9. Move your tech stacks out of silos. Shared data is key to becoming data driven. (Hello sales people! This is why you need to write call notes and summaries in Salesforce and get that data and insight out of Outlook and your heads! [editorial comment from Gary].)

Craig's presentation style was heavy data on slide (as one would expect from an analyst) and a "gravitas" filled senior-level talking style. I appreciated it and the heavy level of metrics and data.

Why Your Go-To-Market Strategy Is Broken & How To Fix It

Session by Sangram Vajre. Main takeaways:

1. What are our alignment problems with ICPs? Market fit! What is the product-market fit? Figure that out, and then you can scale.
2. The path is from Problem to Product to Platform. And each stage is necessary (from startup to unicorn) as each stage has a lot of stuff you can learn from and adjust to.
3. The CEO owns Go to Martket! The CRO and CMO operationalize it. Own, not does all the work. But owns!
4. Gating can help you locate intent signals at the individual or account level.
5. GTM is a process, not a project!

He provided a framework for GTM, which I believe is in his next book at https://www.themovebook.com/

Sangram is an extremely energetic presenter that refuses to stand still (physically and intellectually). I love the way he challenges the audience and interacts with them in real time.

The Dark Funnel - Buyers Are Discovering, Researching & Evaluating Products In Places Companies Can't Track

Session by Chris Walker. Key takeaways:

On a personal note, Chris went to public school in my hometown of 23 years. As I told Judd Borakove, Chris reminds me of me, only more successful! Also, he presented with no slides, which I find admirable. His voice, his authority, his content, and his engagement style carried the session.

1. As a "non-salesperson" in an interaction, you can sense buying intent if you listen really carefully.
2. You need to tell prospects stuff so that they ask for a meeting. Not ask for the meeting so you can tell prospects stuff. Sales velocity increases a whole lot when it is them asking you for a meeting.
3. B2B customers are researching in places that can't be tracked. There will be a lack of attribution or misattribution that will lead to spending in places where that spend isn't actually doing much.
4. Lower funnel activities are easier to track and to facilitate attribution, but how many of those leads become customers? Things like podcasts, or organic news placements, or events are much harder to attribute. (At dinner last night, I was recommended a tool by word of mouth. I then Googled it and clicked on a paid ad. But attributing my coming purchase to the Google ad is not quite right. [Editorial comment from Gary])
5. Marketers should be in this "dark funnel" driving the signals. Channels that can't be tracked include organic social, Slack channels, trusted press, and earned PR. And yet they are the most effective channels!
6. The dark funnel is about impacting intent. There's that word again! It's a different mindset.
7. The reality is that today, most execs are going to want "traditional" tracking. So run two attribution systems. One for the lower funnel, and one for the dark funnel. Dark funnel attribution includes: Self attribution, word of mouth, win/loss analysis, and large scale market research.

OK, part two is coming. I am in Boston and it's nice out and I want to stop writing for a while! This is a day off!

Be well, Gary